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Link Between Homosexuality/Liberalism and Pedophilia, Exposed!
Specifically, that the link is complete and utter fabrication.
26 Responses to “Link Between Homosexuality/Liberalism and Pedophilia, Exposed!”
The statistics do indicate that homosexual pedophilia is vastly disproportinately represented compared to heterosexual pedophilia. I’m glad to see the article you cite isn’t trying to dispute that particular fact. Whether or not you buy Groth’s psychological take on why that is so is a different debate.
Remarkably, to accept Groth’s argument, you would have to argue that Foley represents a homosexual pedophile that seems to fit neither of the two categories he describes. Foley is clearly interested in exclusively homosexual relationships with people regardless of age , so it cannot be argued he is a heterosexual pedophile who just happens to turn to boys, and yet he is also apparently strongly drawn to teenage boys while not being repelled by adult homosexuality, meaning he is not the exclusively homosexual pedophile described by Groth either. Furthermore, almost most child molesting Catholic priests would not fit into Groth’s categories either. I guess it comes down to definitions. In Groth’s definitions neither Foley nor most child molesting Catholic priests are true pedophiles.
Groth also attempts to argue that such pedophiles are attracted to effeminate boys while suggesting this actually implies heterosexuality not homosexuality. If it is the effeminate traits, rather than the actual gender they are interested in, that begs the question as to why boys are disproportionately represented in the first place. If effeminate characteristics are what is attractive, why not go after girls instead? Of course, he also is ignoring the fact that ordinary homosexual couples, boy gays and lesbians, tend to have both a more masculine and a more feminine partner. Clearly more “masculine” gays are attracted to more “feminine” gays and vice versa.
Attempting to fudge the definitions of pedophilia to exclude homosexuals is an old game with the gay community. Gays have always attempted to argue that either pedophiles are either exclusively heterosexuals (they rigidly define homosexuality to include only adult relationships between homosexuals but don’t define heterosexuality similarly) or they argue you cannot call pedophilia either a truly homosexual or heterosexual practice.
Groth may still have an argument, but I’m not at all entirely convinced.
Of course, since there is likely at least some genetic component to homosexuality, it might be revealing to study how frequently homosexuals and convicted child molesters tend to cluster in families versus heterosexual and convicted child molesters. I can think of several other studies along this line that might tell us one way or another whether Groth is right or not. I think such research is probably far too politically incorrect to see the light of day, however. I think for all of the attempts by gays to claim there is no relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia, many gay organizations would be very upset if they knew an actual scientific study, like the one I mentioned above, was attempting to ascertain whether or not any relationship exists.
Er the Foley thing isn’t pedophilia unless those pages were 16+ year old prepubescents. Hell they were all above the age of consent for the DC area.
“If it is the effeminate traits, rather than the actual gender they are interested in, that begs the question as to why boys are disproportionately represented in the first place.” The study specifically pointed out that “fixated” offenders pick boys as a symbol of their own projections and that “regressed” ones do act on girls a lot more than boys.
it is true that foley is not a pedofile, but he is a hebefile….one who is attracted to adolescents
its still illegal
I have a very limited sample, so I would really like Holly, or anyone else who has known a significant number of gay couples to comment on this, but Tommy’s characterization has not been my experience.
I probably know and have know many more gays than I realize, but I have known two gay couples that I knew about. The first was the infinitely skilled hairdresser that my mom and I went to back when I was in college. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that he was gay (not because he was a hairdresser – it would not have occurred to me to have assumed that a man was gay simply because he was a hairdresser – but) because he was obviously effeminite. I met his partner several times, briefly, and his partner also seemed to be rather effiminite.
The other gay couple that I know is one of my many doctors and his partner, who has managed his office for years. I would never have known that either of them were gay, had I not been told. I knew that my doctor was gay before I ever ment him, but I had no idea about his partner until an friend – after I’d been going to this doctor for five years – told me offhandedly that they were a couple. Neither of them are the least bit effeminite – unless you want to label being highly intelligent, softspoken, and extremely caring as effeminite characteristics, which will also cause you to label lots and lots of totally heterosexual men as effeminite, including, interestingly, more than one of my other doctors, who are definitely heterosexual. (Highly intelligent, softspoken, and extremely caring turn out to be very desirable characteristics in a physician, as you will know if you’ve ever had the other sort, of which there are, unfortunately, plenty.)
Anyway, it’s an unfortunately small sample size, but that is my own personal experience. I don’t know whether it’s representative or not.
Regretfully, I really don’t have the time to go hunting down the articles tonight, but the findings from some of the recent studies that have come to my ears have been giving me the impression that it may not be so much a genetic thing as some sort of hormonal (estrogen/androgen) anomaly in utero. Of course, that doesn’t rule out a genetic component, either.
True. Andrew Sullivan in a series of recent posts put up some song lyrics about men being sexually attracted to 15 or 16 year old girls. His point was that that sort of thing is unacceptable whether the relationship is homosexual or heterosexual, and that we’ve come far enough as a culture that those sort of things are no longer acceptable. I thought it was a wonderful little thought experiment.
Ok , this might sound odd but I’m not so sure all men who molest young boys are acting out of a homosexual urge . It may not be related to their sexual identity so much as it is the result of some prior molestation or other problem .
Quoted from the article:
The real issue here is not so much the difference in maturity (though that is a very serious issue), but the difference in power. If these young men had been 25, it still would have been wrong because of the inequality of power. For the unfortunate person being hit on, there would always be the question of whether rebuffing the unwanted advances might bring their career to a premature end.
Isidora, the “secret” about the gay (male) community is that effeminate men have an extremely hard time finding someone interested in them. The vast majority (both from personal experience and reading about gay culture) prefer guys that I would categorize as the type that most women say they most want — you know, intelligent, caring, but still very masculine. Even most bisexuals want their men to be men and women to be women.
Currently it looks like homosexual (men at least) have a genetic predisposition, but the actual trigger is hormonal. Like most everything, it’s part genetic and part environment.
I guess my problem is that I hate psychological explanations that cannot be easily quantified. I’m very skeptical of things as soft as psychology when there aren’t any statistical results to back them up or those statistics haven’t been subjected to further evaluation by other researchers. Psychologists often tend to oversimplify and pigeonhole complex behaviors and offer conjectures as facts without any supporting data.
Let me give you an example: some people are sadists and masochists and cannot be sexually aroused short of activities involving violence and control (even if it is just mock violence, which for those kind it usually is). In spite of the fact that such people may not be aroused merely by viewing the opposite sex nude (or the same sex for homosexuals), it doesn’t mean that such people don’t have gender preferences. There are both heterosexual and homosexual SMers. We don’t attempt to ignore that fact and classify such people as non-heterosexuals or non-homosexuals just because what ultimately arouses them is not the same as what arouses most people. Such individuals may not be attracted to the same sort of partners that most people are attracted to, but it doesn’t mean they don’t prefer one sex or the other. Clearly, people can have differences not only in gender preference but also in points of arousal as well, and these two things are not, by any means, mutually exclusive.
Way too much conjectural psychology is sold to the public as proven fact without anything but the opinion of the psychologist to back them up. Hell, Freudian psychoanalysis was one of the biggest scientific frauds of the last 100 years. Groth has an interesting conjecture but I would like far more definitive evidence before I rested my laurels on his notions and I wouldn’t be surprised to find upon further research that the situation is either more or less complex than he makes it out to be.
First, I have to agree with Tommy on this:
And I agree with uncle joe mccarthy here:
Well, in some cases illegal and in others not, in terms of sexual activity with minors; but not to quibble because there are many reasons that the behavior was immoral and that should be the main focus. So, what I’m saying is that Foley’s actions were not pedophilia, which is why he doesn’t fit into either of the categories described; but what Foley’s actions represent is an over sexualization of youth and insufficient societal barriers to prevent adults from acting on desires to have sex with youths. This is just an offshoot of our general cultural perceptions, that sex is all about physical attraction and nothing about respecting another person, along with the erosion of any taboos other than consent by another person.
So, while some Christian conservatives do make the false arguments that Groth claims, there are other arguments that are valid. It’s not that it’s about the average homosexual being a pedophile or being likely to be a pedophile, but it is about the culture gradually lowering all taboos against sexual behaviors that can be harmful.
I’ll come back to that later, but first I want to mention the hypocrisy in this:
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LOL, well that’s what I get for trying to post when my five year old is sitting next to me…
Picking up where I left off, the hypocrisy in this:
He admits that Christians had become “enlightened” and belittles the fact that things had changed as of 100 years ago. Instead he focuses on practices of biblical and medieval times as though these represent the views of modern Christians. He also ignores the statment I highlighted above when he draws the false conclusion that it was the advance of liberal secularists that led to a modern understanding of the psychological harm from adult/underage relationships.
The facts in his argument support a progressive understanding of these issues among Christians during the last century, and the Judeo-Christian mores gave a framework to the new taboo of adults refraining from sex with children. So, the real argument by conservatives is that the erosion of that framework is the slippery slope; unless liberals construct some other framework to support discipline in sexual relationships, rather than the current framework of ‘anything that brings pleasure and takes place between consenting adults is not open to criticism”, then there is insufficient societal pressure to prevent the lines being blurred between adults and adolescents. It’s very easy for an adult to pervert the desires of adolescents and to then enter into the realm of a consensual relationship.
C Stanley I have a couple minor quibbles. First of all reform movements normally started among “secular” humanists. The reason I put “secular” is that sometimes they got popular amongst people without religion first, but more often they started in very small Christian denominations like the Quakers or Unitarians that focused most of their arguments in secular principles instead of religious ones. Then once a critical mass of humanists supported reform, some more mainline Christian pioneers were persuaded and helped start the change in the overall public. The same thing has happened more or less for gay rights as it did for women and slaves. I agree his article was too glib about that point, but he was trying to show it was Enlightenment era principles that led to the change, and those were always humanist instead of religious in nature. (Of course the implicit implication is that the Christian Right these days is not humanist, and they will be the first ones to tell you so…even though far more Christians are humanist now than at any time in history since the mainstream Protestant/Catholic churches have changed dramatically in the last 50 years.)
As for your concern about sexual values I agree and disagree. I think pedophilia (and in our society relationships between adults and teenagers normally) is a pathology. Very rarely you might have a teenager that is mature far beyond their years and have a healthy relationship with an older person (the Mary Latterno thing comes to mind, whenever I saw the kid speak it was obvious he was more mature than the vast majority of adults) but most of the time it is about adult manipulation. The point of liberal social structures is to respect the other person, it becomes primary instead of social structures being primary. There might be more open temptation, but I’m not sure that has much of an effect on behavior as having rigid moral laws (have you read much about the twisted sexual psychosis of most countries that have Islamic law? In lots of countries — I know Afghanistan is one — it’s commonly practiced to have boy sex slaves because there is so little contact with women. Not to mention that rape is seen as a dishonor for women, to the point where they are often murdered by their own families if they are victimized and I’ve read lots of firsthand accounts about how most of the men seem incapable of love, they think about women completely in terms of lust.)
Now I’m not saying that Christians are going to revert back to that (although the article pointed out that historically there were simliar attitudes) but the liberal/libertarian point of view is that people have all sorts of weird fetishes that if they are allowed to find someone that shares them and explore it then they can be healthy instead of internalizing it and getting pathological. Unfortunately it’s not just that the US is puritanical or anything, most countries that are very open about sex have just as many problems as we do. This is a case where I think there might not be any good answers because you’ll always have lots of twisted disturbed people that will prey on the weak, it’s just that the Christian idea of a time where everyone was pious and there were no problems is false.
Mikkel,
I’m not so far from complete agreement with you, and I acknowledge that repression of sexual instincts is just as likely to contribute to perversions as the kind of cultural encouragement of sexual permissiveness that conservatives criticize. Both extremes are unhealthy, IMO.
But on this:
I guess my problem with this is that I see no one really promoting that view. Where is the societal pressure for respect to be a component of sexuality? At least within the framework of traditional Judeo-Christian values, there is a structure to provide support for the view of respect for sexual partners. I don’t doubt that people like you feel that the issue of respect should be paramount, but I don’t see any social construct to replace the church in providing that background of values. It can’t be done strictly through the legal system, because it’s really not the government’s business whether or not two sexual partners respect each other. But morally, the churches used to provide the guidelines and now some of us fear that there is no moral guidance and too much blurring of lines of demarcation for appropriate behavior.
OK the second I wrote it I realized that I left something out. I think the reason why no one promotes that view isn’t a liberal/conservative thing, I think it is a crass consumerism issue. Our society has become very materialistic and selfish and to me that is the issue. I agree the churches can help bring balance by providing a spiritual aspect — an aspect that for some reason modern liberalism has lost. Modern liberalism has turned into “sit around and complain about social problems while not doing much personally to help the situation” rather than the idealistic movement it was historically. Personally this is why I am hoping there will be a small government liberalism movement where the traditional universal ideals help give a framework, and it forces each person to think about their role instead of saying “they” should fix it. One of those is equality and respect for individuals. That make more sense?
Yes, it does…but also if I’m reading you correctly, you agree somewhat with my view that the construct for support of moral values isn’t currently in place without the churches? Or at least that you can see why I’m concerned about this? I think that if liberals would move in the direction that you suggest, then there would be less opposition from conservatives and more agreement on some needed reforms.
I can see why you’re concerned, but personally I’ve only noticed a good respect for individuals (which we agreed is the crux) amongst Catholics, smaller liberal denominations that are close to not even being Christian anymore (like Quakers, Unitarians, etc), Jews and some regional old Protestant churches (Lutherans for instance). The vast majority of people I’ve met that think churches are necessary to support moral values are dogmatic. Of course individuals from all sorts of faiths might be different than their organization — I’ve met several evangelical fundamentalists that respect people regardless of their religious beliefs, they just think they’ll burn in hell — but overall that is more rare than not. Any individual that uses their moral grounding as a base to live on instead of something to bludgeon others with is rare.
I think that is a misperception because the ones who want to bludgeon are the more vocal extremists. Similarly, people with my perspective hear the extremists who want to stifle all discussion of morality on the basis that this is ‘judging’ people, and we tend to react to that. I do try to realize that this isn’t really the majority view among liberals, but sometimes it is hard for me to believe that just as it seems hard for you to believe that the majority of Christians aren’t out to condemn those who don’t agree with them.
Of course I agree with you that Catholics fall into the category of respect LOL.
Er I meant individual as in any person with any belief system, not just religious. I am of the opinion that the people like yourself in any belief system are extremely rare but tend to speak a common language. Aldous Huxley has a book “The Perennial Philosophy” where he compares writings by scholars of all the major religions and points out how the same language keeps appearing regardless of time, location or religion. Personally I dislike as many liberals as I do Christians as I do feminists etc because what I value is independent thinking and rationality, combined with “realistic idealism” which is pretty rare. The way the majority of the population deals with this is to just not talk about it (or not care at all) and avoid conflict, it’s just the vocal extremists that insist on bringing it up. The reason why I like the concept of humanism the most is that it doesn’t require its adherents to have any beliefs about the Truth, only about the pursuit of a “better world.” An athiest humanist and fundamentalist humanist can get along perfectly fine because they realize that even though they have different sources of inspiration, it’s the actions you do in life that are most important for helping people.
Hmmm. I agree completely with the second part of that; in my view, ideally we can agree to disagree but find the common ground for the betterment of society. If your definition of humanism is correct though, I wouldn’t put myself in that category because I do believe that there is a Truth and that pursuit of it should be the main goal; I simply believe pragmatically that in the political system we have to seek a different goal of finding the best course instead of the “right” one. I don’t believe the two are mutually exclusive though and in fact my deeply held view is that people who aren’t motivated by belief in a higher power are still motivated to seek the Truth, and when my goals in seeking the Truth coincide with secularists goals for society, I believe that is because God speaks to men in many ways. I believe that God created us to seek this Truth, and when people don’t recognize that God is leading in that direction, I still believe it is so. I guess that probably sounds condescending to an atheist, and perhaps I shouldn’t disclose that belief but it is truly how I see things and whether people realize it or not, this view is consistent with Catholic theology.
Wikipedia definition
“Humanism is a broad category of active ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities—particularly rationalism. Humanism is a component of a variety of more specific philosophical systems, and is also incorporated into some religious schools of thought.
Humanism entails a commitment to the search for truth and morality through human means in support of human interests. In focusing on the capacity for self-determination, humanism rejects transcendental justifications, such as a dependence on faith, the supernatural, or divinely revealed texts. Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of human nature, suggesting that solutions to our social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.”
About Christian humanism: “Mere Humanism might value earthly existence as something worthy in itself, whereas Christian humanism would value such existence, so long as it were combined with the Christian faith.”
The point is that people can have different ideas of why there are universal values (athiests might say it’s genetic, you say it’s God, agnostics don’t care or say it’s impossible to know so why worry about it) but be fully committed to making the world be a reflection of those shared values. And yes I agree that Catholic theology has morphed (in the West) to be very humanist. I just think it’s funny because some of the dogma (about female priests and birth control for instance) most Catholics admit there is no good justification for it other than tradition, but that doesn’t really matter. But cest la vie.
That’s because it’s poorly taught and most Catholics are too lazy to read the papal encyclicals that explain the justification. Pope John Paul II’s series on the theology of the body did so very thoroughly, but most Catholics unfortunately aren’t even remotely familiar with it.
Thanks for the Wiki definitions; I guess what I was questioning is how the general definition of humanism can exclude a religious basis, when there is a separate branch of Christian humanism. In other words, shouldn’t the first definition be of secular humanism if it excludes other philosophies that are humanistic but include a theism basis?
The Wikipedia definition isn’t as clear as it could be. What it means by “rejects transcendental justifications” is that the purpose isn’t to serve God or act because a book tells you to, but to help humanity. You might feel that the book or God have a monopoly on the Truth, but it’s up to humans to handle our problems. A humanist would not believe that if you pray then God will solve your problems, or if you sin then God will destroy your village for instance; but that prayer could be a communication with God to give you strength and direction so you can solve your problems, or that the Bible laid down what is best for humans (because of our intrinsic nature) and if you stray from it you’ll have a hard life since you’re going against yourself. I know that encyclicals are coming more and more into that view.
A religious humanist said
Now personally I feel that pretty much sums up what Christianity is suppossed to be. What do you think?
Yes, I agree. Who is the quote from?
A Unitarian minister. I’m not even sure if he is a Christian (dunno if you know much about Unitarians, it is a pretty wide label at this point in history from devout Christian to Buddhist leanings to agnosticism).
I see; I know a bit about Unitarianism but not much detail. I guess in the quote about the remarkable powers that we have, one’s interpretation could vary as to the source of those powers.
Unitarians are non-Trinitarian, and traditional Christianity believes in the divinity of all three persons of the Trinity, so that makes it quite a serious heresy, at the very least. Wikipedia says that most Unitarian Universalists do not self-identify as Christians.
This is something I was thinking about the other day. Rape has traditionally been seen as a dishonor in Western societies, too, but the ethos associated with it has always been along the lines of, “If you dishonor my daughter/sister/cousin/wife, I will kill you.” Whereas Muslims seem to have it reversed: “If you dishonor my daughter/sister/cousin/wife, I will kill her.” Though it’s true that there have been some Western cultures where there has been pressure on the woman to commit suicide either to prevent or as a result of rape, I’m not aware of Western cultures where a woman would be killed by her relatives to remove the dishonor. The desire for revenge has been strong in Western societies, but revenge is exacted upon the man by the woman’s relatives.
This reminds me of the old Doonsbury strips (back when Joanie was in law school) where she met Andy and really fell for him and was simply crushed when he told her he was gay. There was also a line in a recent episode of the SciFi series Eureka where Jo lamented that all the good ones were either gay, married…or robots.